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Big companies usually use some sort of vulnerability response management software which is connected to your CMDB, ideally containing SBOMs of everything you use, and subscribed to various providers of CVEs. Those tools then map the CVEs to your SBOMs and you'll get alerts, security incidents and so on.
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There are vendors who supply this service as a product -- Wiz, who were one of the groups to independently discover the vulnerability, is one such vendor, there are plenty of others.

I'm not overly keen on the tooling: as far as I can tell the whole industry is prone to flagging false positives as "vulnerabilities" rather than "potential vulnerabilities" and it's a bit too easy to turn those reports into a tick-box "you must update now because the tool says so". But they also do flag true vulnerabilities. And they pay for teams of security researchers to find and fix issues, not least because that's good marketing.

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Several tech stacks have this built in or available.

For my rust applications, I use "cargo audit" which checks all dependencies against the CVEs. For my typescript and javascript applications, deno audit and/or yarn npm audit.

For the rest of the stack `debsecan` does exactly what you want on Ubuntu: report CVEs for installed software.

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I was thinking about this as well today. And while I'm sure there are many cybersec companies that send out alerts, I trust this forum the most.

Maybe it would be worth it to have an agent that knows your stack, reads the top threads on hn all day long and messages you when it thinks there is something serious going on that could impact you.

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I don't think there's any robust method. I lurk HN, subscribe to security lists, run our code through scanning tools regularly. All options suck, all options have gaps, and all options mean you have to stay on the hamster wheel.
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Lots of licensed solutions have this (typically SAST or DAST tooling like Snyk, etc...). Given your build manifest/SBOM they cross-reference CVEs for vulnerabilities during/after build time.

Some have free licenses, many don't.

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There are also better tools like Sysdig, Twistlock, etc. which scan containers at runtime for CVEs.

Sometimes build time is too slow (e.g., a repo that doesn't receive updates every day or so).

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I’m curious about this too, although I would somewhat hesitate to rely on that, except as a contributing point of information.

PHP2SHELL, in particular, made me expand my weekly security review to include my external network resources.

The natural conclusion for this seems to be realtime monitoring CVE and pre-CVE vulnerability indications in exposed stacks.

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GH Dependabot.
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I may be misunderstanding this but think the hard part about building a threat intel feed like this is just trusting that the underlying integration would surface something you care about... especially if you want to DIY it. You can scrape HN, GitHub advisories, NIST, whatever you want... but you may give yourself a false sense of security after seeing the "all clear" checkbox each morning

I hope that someone has some sort of a reasonable approach here / I would love to help work on something open source if not

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Any tool to scan dependencies takes various inputs like repos, container stores or already built SBOM and gives you warnings. It doesn't much matter if you have actual code and repos as long as you know how to point it at some. The fremium ones like snyk would love to send you an email report on growing CVE counts on your last run but only until hell freezes over..
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Turn on automatic updates.
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That's great until an attacker compromises the automatic update system and uses it as a vector.
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I would wager that far more systems get exploited because they are out of date (sometimes woefully) than by poisoned package repos.

But, certainly do your own threat assessment and develop and implement whatever plan works for you.

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That's what cooldowns are for
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That's great until you have a public zero-day exploit.
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If it's big enough like this one you can always make an exception.
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but the embargo delayed the updates
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This is how you get wrecked by malicious packages being published or other breaking bugs. Pin your versions.
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